Questions from the Senior Center listening session

A recurring problem during the Prop 2.5 override campaign was that most of the detailed information put out by the Invest in Medford campaign was digital, and seniors — a significant chunk of voters — don’t use computers as much as younger people. During one conversation, towards the end of the campaign when I was running on fumes, an older woman told me that City Council needed to be more transparent. This was something I had put a lot of time into addressing — livestreaming Youtube videos, formatting the City Council newsletters, writing these blog posts, and even starting work on an open data policy. But, from her perspective, she was right. All of that was online.

Shortly after the campaign, Councilor Lazzaro approached me before a regular meeting with the idea to start holding regular listening sessions, in person, at the Medford Senior Center. I crankily refused at first. Then I thought about it for a little and realized that it was probably the best thing Council could do to address this issue. We held the first such session, advertised in the Senior Center Newsletter, on January 30th during their daily lunch.

The two of us spent the whole time fielding questions and hearing about folks’ concerns and grievances with different initiatives of City Council. It went well. There were between 12 and 15 people present. Even though many residents weren’t happy — seniors on a fixed income naturally don’t like the tax raises that came from the overrides, and they were concerned that rezoning initiatives would limit their parking — they seemed to appreciate that we were taking the time to attend. Sometimes people just need to blow off steam. I brought a notepad to write down the general points they were saying, and I thought I would use this blog post to note the major ones.

Parking

By far the most frequent point brought up was parking. Right now there is an open Request for Proposals on the lots around City Hall and the Senior Center. This would allow developers to build onto these lots, but the seniors don’t want to lose parking around their center.

The issue with this particular concern is that seniors are not actually going to lose parking. While the planning department cannot require that developers in the RFP have parking in their designs, they can make it clear that building a bottom-floor parking garage is highly recommended and to make it clear that they will choose proposals with such requirements.

Even with this as a given, the seniors brought up two concerns: first, they prefer open lots to parking garages. Second, the parking would temporarily be lost during the building of the project on lots around City Hall. This is true — parking would be lost during any construction to those lots — but it is a temporary state of affairs.

To me, it’s difficult to come to terms with the use of that space. During the day, while the senior center lot itself is usually full, the lots around the senior center are typically pretty empty. (The exception to this is during nights when the Chevalier Theater has a show, which even fills up overflow lots. The main issue there is that the parking lot next to the Chevalier is owned by a private developer, and the city cannot convince him to do anything else with the lot — they’ve tried.)

But, again, with new developments to the lots around the City Hall and the Senior Center, parking will not be lost. It will just be converted to an underground garage.

Affordability

The very first thing that a resident brought up during the listening session was the contradiction between advocating for affordability and passing a Proposition 2.5 override, which raised $7.5 million for the Medford Public School system and a permanent road repair crew in the DPW.

As I said during the last City Council meeting, the overrides were necessary. That’s not to say that there weren’t tradeoffs, but they were necessary. The city had a budget that had been eaten up by inflation for decades and was prevented from increasing beyond that due to the limitations in increases imposed by Prop 2.5. Continuing to kick the can down the road by keeping taxes artificially low is not making the city more affordable. It’s just a failure to invest.

Even so, I felt for them. Many seniors are on a fixed income. One woman wanted 20% reduction on property tax assessments for seniors (she had to leave before I could explain to her that the city is not able to influence assessments in that way). But City Council has adopted all of the exemptions for seniors allowed under Massachusetts General Law. We also adopted the maximum allowable ratio between commercial property taxes and residential property taxes. Medford actually does have a good number of other programs that allow seniors to defer or reduce their taxes. One of them allows seniors to defer 100% of their taxes until sale of the property or death, after which the sum (with interest) comes out of equity of the house. There’s also a senior tax work-off program, which allows seniors to lower their taxes through volunteer hours. The point is, we’ve done all we can under the current system to help seniors with this issue, but at some point we also had to stop layoffs in the school system and prevent our roads from crumbling further.

Salem Street and Rezoning

Salem Street came up a lot. City Council is working on a citywide rezoning project in which we are both altering general zoning policies (implementing things like a Green Score and a Transportation Demand Management program) and individual neighborhoods, one by one. The first local area we rezoned was Mystic Avenue, and my colleague already wrote a nice post describing the more recent proposed changes to Salem Street. The biggest change there is allowing three-story buildings by right with incentives that allow developers to build up to six stories.

What’s the problem? For some background: a few months ago, a company put in an application to open up a methadone clinic on Salem Street. This caused a public outcry from a few locals in the area. This issue eventually made its way to a City Council meeting. City Council had no authority to stop the company from opening up a clinic, but things that City Council has no power over tend to make it into Council chambers anyway, since those meetings provide a public platform. The pushback caused the company to voluntarily withdraw. This effort left a group of organized and empowered Salem Street residents, and the ringleaders of this network ended up pivoting to opposing any new rezoning in the area.

An advertisement put out by the group for their own information session on the rezoning. Most of the things in this graphic are untrue.

The issue with the messaging coming out of this group is that it’s either untrue or grossly mischaracterizes what the changes are or what their effects will be. Responding to everything is like playing whack-a-mole. A lot of what I hear is secondhand gossip that came from closed-door meetings or an endless stream of Facebook posts, which makes it more difficult to respond to. But their time and ability to make in-person conversations happen far exceeds that of any city staff member or politician, so it does have an effect. Seniors at the listening session seemed to think that the zoning changes would reduce parking from 1.5 per unit to 0.8. The Salem Street rezoning proposal isn’t changing parking — that will be looked at at a later stage, but the rezoning in its current draft hasn’t affected that. For a while they were claiming that the rezoning would allow 17-story buildings on Salem Street. One topic of discussion from the listening session was that the densities would cause fire hazards, and that increased traffic from this density would prevent fire trucks from getting to those buildings on time. At one point, weeks before the listening session, I heard a rumor that the new zoning would ban small businesses (no, it won’t). And so on. [Note: after I published this post, a resident emailed me, saying they were told that the rezoning would remove the 101 bus from Salem Street. City Council doesn’t even have the authority to change MBTA bus routes.]

Communication around the rezoning does need to be revamped. One thing I do concede is that the zoning website (at least as of the writing of this blog) is disorganized. A lot of the zoning documents are to be found in old City Council agendas, in various stages of completeness, and zoning is a technically complicated subject that’s tricky to boil down. In response to this, city staff and consultants decided to hold their own information session on it on February 10th (6:30PM at the Roberts School), and the consultants we’re working with are creating short videos to simplify the rezoning process to residents.

If you have more questions, particularly if you’re a senior, feel free to reach out!